Kill Lists Will Continue

Outside of websites such as Antiwar.com, there has
been remarkably little commentary over the issue of the White
House–managed kill lists, which played no part in the election but will
nevertheless continue to be a keystone of security policy in the new
administration in Washington. Details on how the lists were
developed and maintained surfaced in the media on Oct. 23
in an article
in the Washington Post which described how the White House
has decided that targeted assassinations will continue to be
necessary for the next decade. The article provoked some negative
commentary in the usual places, but little in the way of genuine
outrage. In a saner world, one might even have expected that
extralegal targeted killing could have been used in a partisan
fashion by the Republicans to highlight Obama’s dismantling of
constitutional and legal protections, but Mitt Romney voiced nary a
word of criticism, suggesting that he too sees death by government
fiat as an essential tool against terrorism and approves of what the
president is doing.

The assassination by drone and special ops teams was a program
initiated by President George W. Bush but it appears that it was not
actually made operational until a former community organizer who
promised change named Barack Obama entered the White House. Citing
the difficulty of dealing with the Guantanamo prisoners, Obama
apparently determined that it would be better to kill possible
terrorists than to go through the tactical complications and extra
expense entailed in trying to detain them and risk a trial in a
court of law.

I would suggest that what media attention there has been has
focused far too narrowly on the lists maintained by the White House
and National Security Council that include American citizens. The
reality is that kill lists have metastasized across the government
to include the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
and are symptomatic of a transformation of U.S. foreign and defense
policies. They have all become part of a ten year government
created master plan to confront Islamic fundamentalism worldwide
using drones and special operations teams, without little or no
consideration for the local conditions that have led to the rise of
religious extremism nor any concern for the consequences unleashed
by the American interventions.

We are seeing a series of wars unprecedented in scope that are
carefully being disguised as non-wars, or, at best, limited
objective constabulary actions, while the definition of terrorist
has become increasingly elastic, permitting the listing of anyone
who supports in any way or condones the activities of any group
viewed as threatening to American interests. The CIA, which has
recently requested
a sharp increase in the number of drones it operates, is being
transformed from an intelligence service into a paramilitary
organization. It uses the unmanned aircraft in Pakistan, Yemen, and
in Africa because those areas are not officially war zones for the U.S. The Agency engages in “plausible denial,” refusing
to confirm that it is involved in any such activity, which enables
the White House to wrap a shroud of secrecy around the attacks.
Even if the plausible denial argument has, however, been rendered
somewhat thin by repeated references to drone operations made by the
administration itself, the CIA is also frequently the instrument of
choice because it can operate by government fiat and is not required
to go through the bureaucratic hurdles and congressional oversight
that the Pentagon must undergo to carry out operations. The
military is consequently most engaged in places like Afghanistan,
where it attacks the Taliban and other targets that are considered
to be part and parcel of an actual war situation.

The White House, CIA, and Pentagon all require intelligence
information to generate targets that are to be killed, driving the
bureaucratization
of the process, and that is where the true weakness of the
monster that has been created lies. This intelligence collection
has morphed into a process which the administration has dubbed its
“disposition matrix,” which pulls together all available
information on potential targets while also identifying available
resources ready to “dispose” of them. The information
collected on targets flows to and from a newly created command
center in northern Virginia run by the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC), to the CIA and the National Counter Terrorism
Center, and to the National Security Council ops center in the White
House. The central resource, maintained by the NCTC, is a
constantly evolving and expanding data base that basically tells you
everything you want to know about who the enemy is, to include the
best way to find and kill him. It also establishes linkages to all
of the enemy’s friends and neighbors, just in case you should
decide to add them to the list at some future point. Two weeks
after American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone in
Yemen his sixteen year old son Abdulrahman was also killed, according
to Obama adviser Robert Gibbs, because “he should have a
far more responsible father.” The new set of interlocking
bureaucracies has created both a mechanism and an imperative to add
new names to the list, meaning that identifying and killing
designated enemies sometimes based on little or no evidence has now
become an everyday function of the United States government.

The NCTC relies on the worldwide data collection efforts managed by
the National Security Agency which will eventually feed into an
enormous computer
complex that is still under construction in Bluffdale, Utah. U.S.
citizens are not immune from the ever widening net information
collection process as any establishment of a linkage, no matter how
tenuous, can lead to inclusion in the pervasive computer-driven
searches conducted by the government. Data on Americans can now be
collected at will and retained for up to five years without having
to demonstrate any reason for doing so.

As for who is actually a terrorist and deserving of a death sentence
from a Washington bureaucrat, it should be observed that
capabilities of the United States intelligence agencies vary from
region to region and the ability to develop reliable information is
not always a given. This is true even in places where considerable
resources are in place, as Benghazi demonstrated two months ago.
The long list of hellfire missile victims that has included wedding
parties, farmers, travelers, or people who just happened to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time provides testimony that the
intelligence used to identify and kill suspected terrorists is often
either erroneous or impossible to corroborate. So basically
Washington is operating a vast killing machine, almost robotic in
its technical efficiency, that actually rests on the garbage-in-garbage-out principle, meaning that there is no quality control
regarding the potential victims. Any bit of information, be it
gossip or even slander, can wind up in a file. Anyone can wind up
on a list for disposition with no way to challenge the information
that can lead to a death warrant. If the Obama legacy will be death
from the skies, as it surely should be, it ought to strengthen the
resolve in all of us to resist the kind of nation that we have
become over the past eleven years and to reject the kind of
leadership that has led us down this road.